Advent Sermon Series Part 3

Here's Part 3 of my 2011 Advent sermon series.

Who Are We Waiting For?  Part 3

Jesus as Savior:  Saved From What for What?

Scripture:  Luke 2:8-14; 2 Corinthians 5:16-19

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen. 

In this Advent sermon series so far we have considered the importance of Jesus of Nazareth having truly been a human being like us and what it means for us to confess him as God Incarnate.  Those topics are vitally important for Christians, yet there is at least one more thing that we need to consider for our answer to our theme question of who we are waiting for to be anywhere near complete—not that it can be complete in three short sermons of course.  Almost from the very beginning Christians have called Jesus “Savior.”  We heard them doing that in our reading from Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth just now.  Many of us can recite those lines by heart, probably in the King James version.  They are the angel’s announcement of the birth of Jesus to the shepherds.  The angel says “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people; to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  Clearly Luke sees Jesus as a Savior, and so has the Christian tradition nearly from the very beginning.

Who are we waiting for?  A savior.  OK.  Jesus is a savior, but what exactly does it mean for us to call him Savior?  To answer that question we have to start, I think, with exposing an assumption that lies behind the title of Savior that we give to Jesus.  If Jesus is our Savior, then we must need saving from something.  Now, I would be surprised if the answer that comes immediately to your mind when you hear the question “what do we need to be saved from” were anything other than “sin.”  After all, Christianity has been saying for nearly 2,000 years that what Jesus saves us from is sin.  Put a bit more precisely, Christianity has said that Jesus saves us from the consequences of our sin.  That is, he saves us from the damnation that, the church has said for so long, is the just and inevitable consequence of our sin unless Jesus saves us from it.  Sin is the traditional Christian answer to the question of what we need to be saved from.

Unlike some of my more humanistic colleagues I believe that sin is very much a reality in human existence.  It is very much something from which we need to be saved.  Sin and its feared consequences are very real existential issues for people today.  Yet with many other Christian theologians today I also believe that there are other basic existential issues that are, if anything, bigger, more real, and more immediate concerns for many people today than sin is.  Two that are commonly identified in discussions like this one , and two that I know are very real to many people and to me, are meaninglessness and the fear of nothingness.  That is, we have a sense that life has no real meaning, and we fear that nothingness, non-being, simply an empty end of us, is our ultimate destiny.  I believe that all three of these things—sin, meaninglessness, and the fear of nothingness—are existential dilemmas from which we need to be saved.  But wait!  There’s more!  The whole world has things from which it needs to be saved too.  Two things that come immediately to my mind are injustice and our ways of violence, including war.  So it turns out that there are lots of things that we and the whole world need to be saved from.  Which of course leads immediately to the question:  Does Jesus save us from all of these things, and if so, how?

Now, pretty clearly I can’t talk about each of these things from which we need to be saved in one sermon; but I think I can say something meaningful that at least applies to all of them by asking one fundamental question:  Do all of these things from which we need to be saved have something in common?  I think that they do, and it is that common something that I want to address here. 

What all of these existential dilemmas that we humans face have in common is that they are all grounded in a real or a perceived separation from God.  They are all manifestations of an alienation from God.  We sin and fear the consequences of sin because we do not live in an intimate communion with God.  Because we don’t, we lose touch with God’s forgiving grace.  We feel meaningless and we fear an ultimate nothingness for the same reason.  We lose touch with God the source of all meaning.  We lose the assurance that, while we may not know just what form our being takes after our death, nothingness is not our fate because we know that God’s love for us never ends.  We oppress others, and we engage in and support acts of violence against our fellow human beings, because we live according to human values and are alienated from God’s values.  All of these existential dilemmas, all of these things that trouble our souls, are symptoms of a more basic existential dilemma, separation or alienation from God.

If our most basic problem is alienation from God, that is, if all of the more specific things from which we need to be saved are manifestations of that more fundamental human problem, as I believe they are, then what do we need a savior to do for us?  Why to reconcile us with God of course.  To overcome our sense of separation from God.  To restore us to intimate communion with God and thus to overcome our alienation from God.  St. Paul knew that reconciliation is the salvation that we need.  We heard him say it in our reading from 2 Corinthians this morning.  Paul says that we have new life “from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself….”  In another place that is my favorite Bible passage Paul says the same thing by saying that nothing in all creation will be able to “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  Romans 8:38-39, emphasis added  Paul was convinced, and so am I, that in Jesus Christ any separation from God that we feel, any alienation from God that we perceive, is overcome.  That is how Jesus is our Savior.

And you’re probably saying to yourself something like “OK, that’s nice, but how does that work exactly?  How is our separation from God overcome in Jesus?”  At least, I hope you’re asking yourself something like that, for something like that is the necessary next question.  And this is where the subjects we considered in the first two sermons in this series come in.  Jesus does it by demonstrating in his human nature what human life looks like when it is lived according to the will of God and by teaching with his words and more importantly with his life God’s values of justice, compassion, and nonviolence.  And he does it by demonstrating in his divine nature just how God actually relates to creation.  In him we see God relating to creation by being present with us in it.  In him we see God entering into and experiencing in God’s own person the life and the death of a creature, of a mortal human being.  People wanted, and many still want, God to break into creation with power to change things for the better.  In Jesus we see that that is not how God relates to the world.  God’s relationship to the world is precisely one of presence and solidarity with God’s people and with all of God’s creation.  That’s how Jesus overcomes the separation from God that we so often feel and that is the root of so many evils, by showing us that any separation we feel between ourselves and God is entirely of our own making.  As far as God is concerned there simply is no separation, there simply is no alienation of creation from its Creator. 

Because as far as God is concerned we simply are not separated or alienated from God, we can overcome all of those things from which we need to be saved.  We know that sin does not separate us from God.  We find meaning in a life lived in intimate communion with God.  We know God’s love, and we know that that love will not end when we die.  We learn how to live, and we know that, because Jesus was a human being, living that way is a real possibility for us humans.  Our basic existential dilemma is alienation, and Jesus overcomes our alienation by showing us that it as far as God is concerned the alienation we perceive just isn’t real.

In Jesus we are saved from everything that we think we need saving from because we know in him that we are never truly separated from God, and in Jesus we are saved to the kind of life God wants us to have.  We are freed to live the spiritually abundant life Jesus came to give us.  We are freed to live lives of service without limitation.  We are freed to be prophets of peace and justice without fear.  We are saved from life the way we humans have made it for life the way God created it.  We are freed to life with and for God because we are freed from all of the fear, all of the doubt, all of the misplaced values that keep us from living life with and for God. 

Jesus isn’t our Savior through some act of cosmic magic in which we have no part.  Rather, Jesus is our Savior when we turn to him in faith and see in him how we humans are meant to relate to God and how God relates to us.  The salvation that Jesus brings isn’t something that we have to wait until we die to realize.  It is salvation first in this life, salvation that comes from the reconciliation between God and creation that Jesus demonstrates.  God never was distant from creation, but we humans are so good at creating our own distance from God.  That is the distance that Jesus overcomes.  That is the reconciliation that Jesus effects.  That is Jesus as Savior.  In Jesus God reconciled the world to Godself, and nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in him.  In Jesus Christ, we are saved.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Advent Sermon Series Part 2

Here's the second part of my Advent sermon series

Who Are We Waiting For?  Part 2

Jesus as Divine:  What Are We to Make of the Incarnation?

Scripture:  Matthew 1:18-24; John 1:1-5, 14

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Last Sunday afternoon my son Matt asked me what I had preached on that morning.  I said it was the first part of a sermon series titled “Who Are We Waiting For?”  He replied “How can you stretch an answer that is one word into three sermons?”  I replied:  “Experience.”  Then I explained that while “Jesus” is the answer to this series’ title question, that answer is actually quite complex.  Today we get into some of that complexity.  In Part 1 of this sermon series titled “Who Are We Waiting For?” I insisted at considerable length that before Jesus was anything else he was a real human being.  That is true, and it is important; but for the Christian tradition it is not a complete answer to the question of who Jesus is for us.  It is not a complete answer to the question “Who are we waiting for?”  Jesus was a human being, yes; but the Christian tradition  has said almost from the very beginning that, while not ceasing to be a human being, Jesus was also much more than a mere human being.  Almost from the very beginning the Christian tradition has said that Jesus of Nazareth was God Incarnate, God become human.  What are we to make of that contention?  Does it have any meaning for us?  To those questions we now turn in this second part of our Advent sermon series.

Although many progressive Christians today see Jesus as merely a man (trust me, I see them all the time in my work on our Conference Committee on Ministry), I remained convinced that the classic Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is indispensible to true Christianity.  Although its classic theological formulation didn’t come until the fourth century CE, the doctrine of the Incarnation has its roots in the New Testament.  We heard some of those roots in our readings this morning.  In Matthew’s birth story Jesus is called Emmanuel, which means God with us.  The prologue to the Gospel of John that we also heard says that something it calls “the Word” was actually God and that the Word then became flesh, that is became a human being in Jesus.  However it is stated, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation holds that Jesus was, at the same time, both fully human and fully divine.  That he was God but that he was also fully and completely human.  Human and divine, not human or divine. 

How in heaven’s name are we to understand that contention, that someone who was human like us was also God Incarnate?  To get at how we are to understand the Incarnation we have to start, I think, with understanding the experience that the first Christians had of Jesus.  Clearly both during his lifetime when he was physically present with them and after his death when he was spiritually present with them, the earliest Christians experienced the presence of God in Jesus in some unique way.  In him they saw a revelation of the nature and will of God unlike anything they had experienced before.  They felt the very presence of God in him in a way they had never felt before.  They somehow knew that he communicated truth about God in a unique way, and they felt that he not only taught that truth, he somehow was that truth. 

This experience came first, then the earliest Christians struggled to find language with which to express that experience of the presence of God in Jesus.  We see them doing that in our Gospel readings this morning.  Matthew turned to the prophet Isaiah and found the term Emmanuel, God with us.  The author of the Gospel of John turned to the wisdom tradition of Israel and found the Word, John’s term for a concept that in earlier Jewish literature was called Wisdom.  Later, the bishops gathered at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 CE would use more philosophical language, the language we know from the Nicene Creed, primarily that he was “of one substance” with God the Father.  Whatever language Jesus’ followers found to express their experience of the human being Jesus being somehow also God, their language for him was always grounded in an experience of him that precedes the language.  The language is symbolic, that is, it points beyond itself to a truth that can never really be captured in human language.  That truth is found first of all not in language but in an experience, the experience of Jesus’ followers then and now that in him and precisely in his humanity we meet God in a unique way.  As is the case with all human truth, experience comes first.  The experience of Jesus as manifesting the presence of God comes first.  Then we try to find language to express that experience.

That really is what the Incarnation, what the understanding of Jesus as divine, is all about.  We aren’t to understand it literally.  We aren’t to think literally that somehow there was a human Jesus and a divine Jesus both living in the same body.  Rather, we are to understand that in the human being Jesus we see and come to know God.  My favorite way of putting it is to say “if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.”  Jesus is divine because in him we see God, we see what God is like.

And just as Jesus being truly human really matters, so does Jesus being truly divine in this symbolic sense also matter.  To understand how it matters, think of Jesus as being all about relationship.  As a human being he shows us how we are to relate to God.  We see the human Jesus relating to God in faithfulness to God’s calling to him, in faithfulness in proclaiming and living out the Kingdom of God, in a life of prayer, and in a life of compassion for all of God’s people.  As human Jesus shows us how we are to relate to God.

As divine Jesus shows us how God relates to us.  A mere human being can reveal to us a lot about being human, but a mere human being can’t really reveal anything to us about God.  It is in his divine nature that Jesus shows us who God is.  Because we confess him as God Incarnate we see in him not only ideal humanity.  We see also as much of the nature and will of God as we humans are capable of comprehending, we see how God relates to us humans and to all of creation.  It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we can understand his teaching as coming not just from another human being but from God.  It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we come through him to know God as compassionate, nonviolent, passionate about justice, and always forgiving of our human failings.  It is because we confess that Jesus is God Incarnate that we see the way in which he turned the wisdom of the world on its head not just as the teaching of a fellow human being (however wise and prophetic a human being we may think him to be) but as the teaching of God. 

And here’s the main thing for me:  Because we confess Jesus as God Incarnate we see in him how God relates to human life and more importantly to human suffering and to human death.  Because we confess Jesus as God Incarnate we see in his death not merely the death of a martyr, although surely it was that.  We see how God relates to us when we suffer and when we die.  We see God not preventing human suffering and death but entering into them, sanctifying them, and being always present with us in them.  We see all of that in Jesus on the cross, and we couldn’t see any of it without our confession that Jesus is God Incarnate.  When we reduce Jesus to a mere human being his death loses all of its meaning for us; and for me, that is a loss of immense magnitude that takes much of the meaning out of Christianity.  We lose our hope in the face of our mortality.  We lose the comfort that God’s presence can bring when we suffer and when we die, as we all surely do.  In times of grief and pain I have looked to Jesus on the cross and known that God feels my grief and my pain and is present with me in them, and that knowledge has brought me great comfort.  But that knowledge has brought me that comfort because when I see Jesus on the cross I see so much more than a fellow human being.  I see God in human form entering into human suffering and death and demonstrating in fullest measure God’s solidarity with us in those unavoidable human conditions. 

So I say to all of my progressive Christian colleagues who want to make Jesus only a man:  I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t work.  It takes most of the meaning out of our ancient and sacred faith.  Jesus of Nazareth was a human being, yes; and that matters.  It matters a great deal.  But for us Christians he was also God Incarnate, and that matters as well.  It too matters a great deal.  For us Jesus truly is Emmanuel, God with us.  He is the Word of God made flesh.  That isn’t just good news.  It is the best news that there ever was or ever could be.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Advent Sermon Series Part 1

I'll go ahead and post the sermons that I'm doing for the first three weeks of Advent on this blog.  It's a sermon series on the question "Who are we waiting for?"  Here's the first sermon in the series.  I'll post the others as I give them.

Who Are We Waiting For?

Part One:  Jesus as Human:  The Galilean Sage

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 27, 2011

Scripture:  Mark 8:27-30

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

It’s Advent, that season of the church year in which we anticipate and prepare for the birth of Christ.  Recently one of our number said something at our Sunday morning adult education forum that suggested to me something that it might well be worth spending some time on this Advent season.  He said that he had been struggling recently with the question of just who this Jesus is.  That is, after all, one of the central questions—perhaps the central question—of the Christian life.  Jesus himself put it to his disciples.  Jesus asked his disciples who people were saying that he is.  They gave various answers.  Then he asked them:  “But who do you say that I am?”  Mark 8:29  We are anticipating and preparing for his birth, but who is he anyway that we should make such a big deal out his getting himself born?  Who do we say that he is?  That question is so important for Christians that I decided that I would do a three part Advent sermon series on the question “Who are we waiting for?”

That question arises in the context of a Christian tradition that has seen Jesus as God Incarnate and as Savior more than it has seen him as a human being.   Yet whatever else he may have been Jesus was a human being, and it is with his humanity that we must begin our effort to understand who he is for us.  So today you get part one of this sermon series,  Jesus as human.

As we await the birth of Jesus more than anything else we await the birth of a human child.  A human baby.  A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy.  “Away In a Manger” may say “but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes,” but come on.  We’re talking about a human baby here.  A human infant at risk for SIDS, likely to get chicken pox, measles, the flu, or worse. A human being who would die one day like the rest of us. A baby born to a poor, unwed, teenage mother. A poor boy of no worldly status, with no real prospects for getting ahead in life. With a human father at the bottom of the social ladder. A real nobody in the eyes of the world, all those stories about his birth to the contrary notwithstanding. They were all written much later by people for whom he had gone from being nothing to being everything. But at first, at his birth, he was just another baby boy of no account in the world.  It is certain that when he was born nobody but his parents even noticed.

And I need to ask you:  Does it shock you, even just a little bit, to hear me talk about Jesus like that?  I confess that it shocked me a little bit when I composed those lines about Jesus as an ordinary baby boy, as true as I think that they are.  I think there’s a good reason for that shock.  The Christian church has for so long proclaimed Jesus as God Incarnate, as God walking around on earth looking like a human being, that it’s really easy to think of him as God and forget that he was a human being; but before he was anything else, he was a male human being, first a baby boy, then a child, a youth, and finally a young man.  Before he was anything else Jesus was a man, a human being like any other human being in his bodily make up.  Before he was anything else, he was one of us.

He was one of us, and that really matters.  It really matters because his call to us is to follow him.  His call to us is to be like him, and if he were only God there’s no way we could be like him.  I’m not at all sure I can really be like him even with him being truly a human being, but I know that I couldn’t be like him if he were only God.  None of us humans could.  We aren’t God, or even gods.  In other mythologies of other cultures gods sometimes appear as humans, but they never truly are humans.  Jesus is truly human, and that really matters.  We can’t follow someone who only appears to be human but is really a god because we don’t just appear to be humans and not gods, we are humans and not gods.  The great virtue of Christianity is that it says that in Jesus God didn’t just show up on earth appearing to be human.  God actually became human in the person of Jesus.  In Jesus we can see a model of what it truly means to be human only if Jesus truly is human.  He was truly human, and that is why we not only should try to follow him, we actually can follow him.  Robin Meyers, the author of the book we’ve been reading in the Sunday morning group, put it this way in a response he sent me to some questions I had sent to him:  “One cannot emulate…that which is categorically different from oneself.  Whether it is a sports hero, or a comic book character, we admire as a fan what we cannot possibly be expected to imitate.  A human Jesus, on the other hand, takes away our excuses.”

Jesus calls us human beings to be like him, and because he is truly human we can be like him; but of course in order to do that we have to know who he was as a human being.  What sort of human being was he?  What does it mean for us to follow him?  Follow him how?  Follow him in what?  In that book we read in the Sunday morning group in November I found a phrase that I think might be helpful in answering those questions.  Robin Meyers, that author I mentioned above who is also the pastor of a large, progressive UCC church in Oklahoma City, has a term for Jesus that he uses more than any other.  He calls Jesus “the Galilean sage.”  Sage here doesn’t mean an herb you use in turkey dressing.  It means a wise person.  As a human being, quite apart from whether or not he was anything more than a human being (more about that next week), and quite apart from whether or not he did things mere humans can’t do (walk on water, raise people from the dead, and so on), Jesus was a wisdom person.  He taught wisdom and he embodied wisdom.  He taught and he embodied the wisdom of God.  Of God yes, but he did it as human being; and that means we can do it too.

OK.  Jesus was a sage, a wisdom person; but just what was the wisdom that he taught?  There’s no way to give a complete answer to that question in a short sermon, or even in a long book.  So let me suggest something that characterized his teaching generally rather than spend too much time on specific teachings, important as those are.  We all know something about worldly wisdom.  We know how the world works.  We know what the world values.  The world values power.  The world values wealth.  The world values success, prestige, and status.  The world looks up to those who succeed in acquiring those things, and the world doesn’t much care how they got them or who got used and exploited along the way.  The world is organized into nations, and the nations of the world routinely use violence against each other and against their own citizens.  They use violence to gain territory, access to natural resources, or other things they think they need; and they don’t much care who dies in their efforts to get them.  They use violence against their own citizens.  They execute people they believe are criminals.  They unleash the riot police and even the military on crowds that are making demands that those in power in the nation don’t like.  All of those things are the ways of the world—the ways of Jesus’ world and the ways of our world.

If you want to know what Jesus taught about any particular subject, look first at what the world says about that subject.  You’ll be pretty safe in assuming that Jesus taught the opposite.  He taught nonviolence.  About that there is no doubt whatsoever.  He taught justice, and by justice he meant what the great prophets of the Jewish tradition meant by it—care for the poor, the needy, the marginalized, the vulnerable.  He meant inclusion of the outcast.  He valued the ones the world dismisses and ignores.  He made the last first and said see me in “the least of these.”  We saw some of that teaching in our reading from the Sermon on the Mount this morning.  Jesus taught compassion not condemnation, love not hate, care not purity.  In everything he said and did he turned the world’s wisdom on its head and taught the wisdom of God in its place.

And it is so easy to dismiss all of that teaching as some sort of otherworldly ideal that is so impractical as to become impossible in the world.  Maybe it’s the wisdom of God, but we aren’t God.  Maybe it gets lived out in some sort of heaven on some other plane of existence; but we live in this world, and in this world Jesus’ vision just doesn’t work.  It is so easy to come to that conclusion, and that is why Jesus being first of all a real human being is so important.  It is so important because the reality of Jesus’ humanity means that living in the wisdom that he taught and that he lived is a human possibility not merely a divine one.  His thoughts are not beyond us, for they are the thoughts of a human being.  His way of life is not beyond us, for it is the way of a human life.  Jesus being truly human and not merely appearing to be human really does matter.

Yet at least since the fourth century CE the Christian church has focused much more on Jesus’ divinity than on his humanity.  It has so emphasized his divine nature that his human nature has often been ignored.  The church often makes him a God-Man to be worshipped rather than a God-filled human being to be followed.  The church has so often made him the magic key to heaven’s gate rather than a model and guide for human life on earth.  Yet what we prepare to celebrate is the birth of a real human baby.  A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy.  And that, my friends, is very good news indeed; for we await the birth of one who is one of us, one from whom we can truly learn, one whom we can truly follow.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

If You Can't Win Telling the Truth You Deserve to Lose

So it has begun.  We all know that American presidential campaigns always feature dirty trucks and misleading campaign ads.  At least since the days of Richard Nixon that has been more true of Republican campaigns than of Democratic ones, but it goes on all the time in most presidential campaigns.  Yet Republican candidate Mitt Romney has gotten his presidential campaign off to a start that crosses even the very broad and fuzzy lines of American presidential politics.  His campaign has put out a television ad in New Hampshire that contains a flat out and very significant lie.  There's no other word for it.  It's a lie.  The ad features Barack Obama in 2008, then a candidate for the presidency, saying "if we keep talking about the economy we're going to lose."  The ad makes it appear that that is something Obama said about himself and his own presidential campaign.  It isn't.  Those lines were spoken by someone in the John McCain campaign.  Obama is merely quoting them.  When the full clip of what Obama said played it is clear that he was quoting a statement by the McCain campaign and hurling it back at them to show McCain's ineptitude on economic issues.  Romney's campaign has deceptively edited Obama's statement to make it look like he was talking about himself.  Romney's ad is a bald-faced, flat out lie.  There is no other word for it.

Readers of this blog know that I am no fan of Barack Obama's.  Elsewhere on this blog I have stated the reasons why I probably will not vote for him again.  I gave him a little bit of money in 2008.  I have no intention of doing so again.  He is a massive disappointment at best, and his values, which are a version of the basic values of empire, are not my values.  How one feels about Obama, however, should not affect one's reaction to this particular bit of deception and mendacity by the Romney campaign.  Even Romney supporters, if they have integrity (although frankly it is hard for me to see how any Romney supporter can have integrity since Romney himself has none), will condemn this ad as transgressing even the nearly nonexistent boundaries of American political polemics.

I once sent an email to the congressional campaign of Republican John Koster here in Washington state after I received a push polling call from his campaign that contained a flat out lie about Obama's health care reform.  I said that if you can't win by telling the truth, and I sincerely hope you can't, you don't deserve to win.  I now say the same thing to Mr. Romney and to all American political candidates.  Our politics are rotten to the core with the influence of money.  That much is obvious; but our politics are also rotten to the core with lying, with deception, with spin that has no interest in truth but only in manipulating uninformed and gullible voters.  Someone once said that the best thing you can say about democracy is that every other possible political system is worse.  That may be true, but our supposedly democratic system has so decayed, is so rotten with money and unethical campaigning, that sometimes I wonder.  It is becoming more and more a system in which I have no confidence.  The presidential campaign that is now beginning gives no sign that things will get better. They seem only to be getting worse.

Violence Is Now Our Norm

There's a commercial that has been running on American television lately.  It is an ad for a HTC cell phone.  As a young man walks through a city scene listening to music through headphones plugged into this cell phone all kind of things blow up behind him.  Several cars, including a police car, are flipped onto their roofs, which then collapse, presumably killing everyone inside.  It is a scene of violent mayhem breaking out in an American city; and the young man plugged into the cell phone walks through it completely oblivious to what is happening behind him.  Also running on American television are ads for several different video games, all of them depicting some kind of combat.  Sometimes the combat looks contemporary.  Sometimes it looks medieval, but it is always violent with lots of death and destruction.  Many, albeit not quite all, of our popular movies are immensely violent too.  The supposed sport of boxing, which is simply violence for the sake of entertainment, is making a comeback; and the even more violent extreme cage fighting is becoming mainstream.

The conclusion is inescapable:  Violence is now the norm of our popular culture.  The acceptability of violence is taken for granted.  We don't just accept it, we expect it.  We don't just tolerate it, we find it entertaining.  Our advertising agencies use it to sell even products that in themselves have nothing to do with violence, and advertising agencies succeed when they have their finger securely on the pulse of popular culture.  Violence is now our cultural norm.

Violence is our norm in more ways than in our popular culture.  It is our norm in foreign affairs as well.  When something happens that we don't like we find someone to invade, Iraq and Afghanistan being the most recent examples.  More recently we have taken to targeting for death specific individuals whom we have identified as terrorists, never mind that they have never been convicted of anything through any kind of legal process.  I have written elsewhere in this blog about the evil of the glorification of the military and our calling everyone in uniform a hero.  Those dynamics too are part of the way in which violence is now our norm.

Of course violence has always been a big part of American culture.  Like every empire before us our country was founded in violence, expanded through violence, and preserved through violence.  Violence has always been part of our entertainment.  Those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s lived on movie and TV westerns in which the good guys always defeated the bad guys (and the Indians, who were mostly identified as bad guys) through violence and on World War II movies in which the horror of war was sanitized and violence was heroic when it was our side that applied it.  Still, it seems to be getting worse.  The violence of our popular entertainment is more graphic and, I think, more pervasive than it has ever been before.

Jesus Christ's teaching of nonviolence has always been counter-cultural.  It was counter-cultural when Jesus preached and lived it in Roman-occupied Galilee.  It was counter-cultural when Gandhi taught and lived it in British-occupied India.  It was counter-cultural when Martin Luther King taught and lived it against American racism and unjust economic and foreign policies.  It is counter-cultural today.  Convincing Americans that violence is always immoral and that there are nonviolent ways of dealing with the problems we face is a very tough sell.  Trust me on that one.  I try to do it all the time.

The response from the defenders of violence is predictable.  They say:  Nonviolence doesn't work.  Violence is necessary to protect people.  Violence is necessary to defeat the bad guys.  Even those of us who advocate nonviolence might, in the right situation, resort to violence to protect loved ones.  Most of those objections simply are not factually true, and even when they may have some truth in them that modicum of truth doesn't make the use of violence moral.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler because he thought assassinating Hitler was the only way to end the war, but he never maintained that his doing so was moral.  He always said that it was something for which he had to ask God's forgiveness.

For all the arguments in favor of the use of violence, there are two undeniable truths for us Christians.  One, which applies to everyone not just to Christians, is that if humanity will not learn the ethic of nonviolence we almost surely will destroy ourselves and most of life on earth.  We have the means to do it.  We have have created nuclear weapons that are able to destroy the earth many times over, and humanity has never developed a weapons system that it hasn't used.

The other undeniable truth for Christians in that Jesus taught and lived an ethic of nonviolence.  Nonviolence wasn't incidental to Jesus' teaching.  It isn't something that we can say applied only to particular social conditions of his time and place.  For Jesus nonviolence was nothing less than the way of God.  We must be nonviolent because God is nonviolent.  Nonviolence was the way of God that Jesus taught with his words and lived with his life.  To follow Jesus is to follow the way of nonviolence.  Christians can and do reject Jesus' teaching of nonviolence all the time, but no Christian can reject Jesus' teaching of nonviolence and truly claim to be following Jesus in that rejection.  To resort to violence is to turn one's back on Jesus.  I simply can see no way to avoid that truth.

Violence is now our norm here in the United States of America, but it can never be the norm for a Christian.  The faith of Jesus Christ calls us to the way of nonviolence.  The faith of Jesus Christ calls us to an ethic and to a life that is counter-cultural.  The faith of Jesus Christ puts us at odds with our culture in many ways, but one of the most fundamental of those ways is how it puts us at odds with our culture of violence.  Being at odds with one's culture isn't easy.  I often think that it would be a whole lot easier, and life might be a lot more fun,  if I could just go along with the ways of my culture, the ways of violence, the ways of consumerism, the ways of economic injustice.  The problem is, I'm a Christian.  Violence is the American cultural norm, but it is not and will not be mine.  Am I sure that I can live according to the ethic of nonviolence in every hypothetical situation I or some proponent of violence can dream up?  No.  I am not Jesus Christ, and I know that I am his fallible follower.  Still, nonviolence is the ethic of Jesus, and I will be true to it to the best of my limited human ability.  As a Christian I can do no other.

The Empire Strikes Back

I don't often post my sermons on this blog.  You can find them at the Sermon Archive section of monroeucc.org if you want to see them.  This one, which I gave on Nov. 20, 2011, is, I think, so timely and so important that I am putting it up here on my blog.

The Empire Strikes Back

A Meditation for Christ the King Sunday

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 20, 2011

Scripture:  Matthew 25:31-46

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

I imagine that most of you are familiar with the Star Wars movies.  In the first of those movies to be made (which turned out to be the fourth movie in the series—go figure) the rebels who are fighting the evil empire have some success in defeating the military forces of the empire, destroying its “Death Star,” a fearful weapon that had destroyed the home planet of some of the rebels.  The title of the second movie to be made (which turned out to be the fifth movie in the series—go figure) is “Star Wars:  The Empire Strikes Back.”  The demonic empire doesn’t back down and roll over in the face of the threat from the forces of liberation.  It fights back—hard.  The rebels pay a steep price for their resistance to the forces of empire.

Now, I wouldn’t be talking about the Star Wars movies in a sermon if I thought that they were merely sci-fi adventure stories, but pretty clearly they are not merely sci-fi adventure stories.  They are true myths, that is, they are stories that speak a truth about the spiritual forces, good and evil, that are at work in the world.  They speak specifically about the spiritual force of empire. 

As the theologian Walter wink has reminded us, all human institutions have a spiritual dimension to them.  The technical term for the spiritual dimension of an institution is its “power.”  Human institutions are somehow more than the sum of their parts.  They behave in ways that aren’t dependent solely on the will of the individuals who make them up.  They have a spiritual essence of their own, that is, they have their “power,” which is the spiritual side of their existence.  Power here doesn’t mean force or even the ability to do things or make others do things.  It refers to an autonomous being that is spiritual rather than physical.  Everything in creation has its power.  An institution’s power is its spirit, it is the way in which the character of an institution is maintained over time even though the people in the institution change.  All human organizations—governments, corporations, universities, service clubs, churches, every human organization—has its power.  Ideas and concepts have their powers too.  In our country the powers of nationalism and consumerism are particularly strong and active.  The powers are invisible, but they are the strongest forces at work in the world other than, we hope, God.  Every human institution acts according to its power.  That’s why groups of humans will do things that the individual humans in them would never do on their own, as when people who in civilian life would never think of taking another human life have no compunction about doing it when they are part of a nation’s military engaged in warfare.  They act not according to their own character but according to the power, the spiritual essence, of the military of which they are a part.

The powers are often demonic, which means that, like individual humans, they often act in ways other than the ways that God their creator intends and desires that they act.  Under the influence of their power, institutions act for their own self-preservation rather than for the good of God’s people.  They use violence to perpetuate their own might, caring more for status and influence than for justice.  Lucas’ empire of the Star Wars movies is a brilliant depiction of the spiritual power of empire, not only as it exists in a galaxy far, far away but as it exists in this world here and now.  That’s what makes the Star Wars movies so compelling.  They are mythic stories about, among other things, the power of a very real worldly institution, empire.

There have been empires in the world for as long as there have been written records of human institutions.  One very appropriate way to look at human history is to see it as a succession of empires—Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Rome, the Arab Empire the Turkish Empire, the British Empire.  Each has risen, had a period of domination, and fallen again, and despite significant differences between them all of these empires have acted in some similar fundamental ways.  They have all established, defended, and tried to perpetuate themselves through the use of violence.  They have all been ruled, through one mechanism or another, by an elite of the wealthy.  They have all put their own power and survival ahead of all other concerns, and they have all claimed to bring peace, security, and prosperity to their people through the liberal application of force.  Those similarities reveal the power of empire in the technical sense of that word.

           Today is Reign of Christ Sunday, what we used to call Christ the King Sunday.  The parable of the Judgment of the Nations that we just heard calls Jesus “king.”  In the first three Gospels Jesus proclaims not himself (as he does in John) but something he calls “the Kingdom of God.”  The original Greek word in the Gospels that gets translated as “kingdom” is basilea, a word that in other contexts gets translated as “empire.”  We could very appropriately say not the Kingdom of God but the Empire of God. 

What Jesus taught and showed with his life is what we could call counter-empire, that is, empire the way God intends and wants it to be, in sharp contrast to empire the way it actually is in the world.  He showed us what empire is like when it is not fallen, when it is not demonic.  We see a little bit of that teaching in Matthew’s judgment of the nations scene.  That parable, like virtually everything else Jesus said and did, turns the world upside down.  It raises “the least” to the level of Jesus Christ himself.  “The least” here clearly means the ones the world thinks of as the least—the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable.  This parable puts them on top, making them of equal value with Jesus Christ himself.  In the empire of God, the least are the most.

           Empire isn’t a concept that applies only to other people and other times.  Many of us Americans today have come to understand our country in terms of empire.  The United States may not have anyone we call the emperor or even the king, but we are nonetheless the dominant world empire of our time.  We see our imperial status in the way the country was formed by expanding and taking over land that had belonged to others, to the native nations, to Mexico, and others.  We see it in the way we use our military power today to project and to protect our supposed economic and political interests around the world.  Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9-11 are perfect examples of the working of the power of empire.  Empire uses military force to project itself in the world, and the United States has done that more times than we can keep track of.  President Obama, our current emperor, just last week announced a new deal with Australia that will have us creating a new military presence on the north coast of that country, a move in pure imperial style to protect our supposed interests from a supposed threat from a competing empire, China.  We have some sort of military presence in over 150 countries around the world.  We spend almost as much on our military as the rest of the world combined spends on theirs.  We are indeed today’s world empire. 

          We see our imperial nature at home too.  Just one quick statistic:  In 2007 the top 1% of our population owned one half of all of our country’s wealth, and the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite few that we have observed since the 1980s has only accelerated in the years since 2007.  We think we’re a democracy, but those are the wealth distribution figures of empire; and empire can never coexist with democracy for long. 

          We are empire, and the empire strikes back.  It strikes back against anything that it perceives as a threat.  Last week it struck back across the country against the Occupy movement, a movement that names the radical income and wealth disparity in our country and calls it undemocratic.  The power of empire acts in ways blunt and in ways subtle to perpetuate empire.  The various police agencies who dispersed Occupy groups across the country recently may not have consciously coordinated their efforts, but in the combined assaults on Occupy groups across the country we see the power of empire, that is, the spiritual dimension of empire, asserting itself through those various police agencies. 

          We also see it in the way the so-called “mainstream media” reported the assault on the Occupy movement.  NPR, for example, reported the authorities in New York justifying that assault by pointing to the First Amendment, saying it guarantees the right to gather but not the right to encamp, that is, it’s ok if you gather in protest as long as you don’t do it for too long or too effectively.  Sources less beholden to the empire for their financing reported a real attack, with police destroying property and assaulting protesters.  In Seattle King 5, a mainstream media outlet, reported the attack on Occupy demonstrators in downtown Seattle with pepper spray as a reasonable response to provocation from the demonstrators.  On the other hand, the Rev. Rich Lang, a local United Methodist pastor and activist, reports how he was temporarily blinded by pepper spray as, dressed in clerical garb and wearing a cross, he tried to separate police and protestors.  He was not threat to anyone.  An 84 year old woman was also attacked with pepper spray.  Are we supposed to believe that she was a threat to the police?  Lang speaks not of a reasonable police response to provocation but of the reality of police brutality and a breakdown in discipline among the police, who continued attacking protestors well after any conceivable reason for doing so had ended, not that there ever really was one to begin with.  The spirit of empire affects every aspect of American life.  Some Americans are finally starting to wake up to that reality.

          Today we celebrate Reign of Christ, or Christ the King, Sunday.  We could call it Christ the Emperor Sunday, but Christ’s empire is radically different from the empires of the world.  It is an empire in which the last are first and the first are last.  It is an empire in which peace is attained through nonviolence and justice rather than through violence and oppression.  Unlike in the world’s empires, in Christ’s empire people are more important than profit; and all have enough because no one has too much.

          Christ the King calls us to the task of building God’s empire of peace and justice. To do that we must dismantle the structures of worldly empire.  We must renounce militarism and the use of violence as a tool of national policy.  We must overturn structures that create and perpetuate the power of the wealthy at the cost of the welfare of God’s people and of God’s good creation.  If we do, the empire will strike back.  Of that there is no doubt.  It struck back against Jesus, crushing him like an annoying gnat and thinking that that act of violence destroyed his word of the Kingdom of God.  It didn’t.  It didn’t destroy the word of the Kingdom of God then, and the violence of empire can’t destroy the word of the Kingdom of God today. 

Today is Christ the King Sunday.  We know what Christ calls us to do.  Are we ready really to accept Christ as our king?  Are we ready to renounce the power of empire and really work for the building of the Kingdom of God?  It isn’t easy.  The empire strikes back.  Jesus knew that the empire strikes back, but that threat didn’t stop him.  Will it stop us?  Amen.

A Veterans Day Meditation on American Heroes

It’s Veterans Day here in the United States of America.  Veterans Day seems to be a bigger deal this year that it usually is.  Maybe that’s because it falls on a Friday this year, thereby creating an uncommon three day weekend for some.  Or maybe it’s because today is 11/11/11, a once a century date that some think has some sort of mystic or magic significance.  (Earlier today I saw the time of 11:11 on a digital clock, making it 11:11 on 11/11/11, yet nothing mystic or magic happened. Go figure.)  Maybe those things explain why Veterans Day seems to be a bigger deal than usual today, but I suspect that there is a less benign reason why we now make such a big deal out of Veterans Day.  I suspect that we make such a big deal out of Veterans Day because the demonic myth is growing and spreading among us that everyone who serves or who has ever served in the American military is a “hero.”  For example, as I write this I have on the television the “Carrier Classic,” a college basketball game being played on the USS Carl Vinson, a huge American aircraft carrier.  The ESPN crew sits behind a desk with a big banner in front that reads “America’s Heroes.”  QED.  I have written on American militarism before.  See in particular the post on this blog titled “Christianity and American Militarism:  Comments Prompted By President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Speech,” posted on January 26, 2011.  I will not repeat here what I said there, but I reaffirm here everything that I said there.  Here I want to reflect more on the way that we call everyone in the American military a hero and to ask:  As it relates to the question of the military, who are the real heroes in American life?  Who should we, as Christians, really be celebrating?

The way in which we call everyone in the American military today a hero is tremendously destructive.  It is destructive first of all because it isn't factually true.  It’s not that some, perhaps many, American military men and women don’t commit acts of heroism.  They do.  They commit acts of bravery and self-sacrifice under the horrific conditions of war.  They engage in acts of service to people at home and around the world in times of natural disaster.  It is not my intent here to deny those facts or to minimize them.  Yet it is also undeniably true that most people in the military lead ordinary, routine lives, going to work each day, raising families, living lives no more heroic than the lives the rest of us live.  It simply is not factually true that everyone in the American military is, in any meaningful sense, a hero.

That, however, is not my main point here.  Rather, what I most want to say is that calling everyone in the military a hero is profoundly destructive in a more fundamental way.  Calling everyone in the American military a hero is destructive because it makes it more difficult than ever to criticize American militarism and to oppose the way in which we use the armed forces to project aggressive American imperial power around the world.  After all, if the American military is made up entirely of heroes, then whatever they do must, by definition, be heroic.  It must be honorable.  It must be something we all should, indeed we all must, support.  Criticizing any use of the military becomes an attack on heroes, and what decent person would attack heroes?  The myth of the American military as made up entirely of heroes is one of the primary tools that the powers use today to perpetuate empire, to perpetuate a culture of violence and the lie of American superiority over other people in the world.

Let me suggest that there is another group of Americans, much less well-known and totally uncelebrated in our public life, who are indeed heroes whom we should be honoring today.  They are the men (mostly) who, in a time when service in the military was mandatory for those who were drafted (i.e., forced involuntarily into service in the imperial war machine), refused to serve in the military out of convictions of faith and conviction of conscience.  Some of these men were Christians from the historic peace churches—Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, and some others.  These men could sometimes get conscientious objector status.  Others were Christians or not Christians at all who for whatever reason were not able to obtain that status.  Some went to jail.  Some fled the country.  All of them are heroes.  They are heroes because they took great personal risk in order to be true to the teachings of their faith or true to the dictates of their conscience.  They took a risk, and many of them suffered, to be true to the ethic of nonviolence.  Christian or not they all were witnessing to the truth of the way of nonviolence..  They took a stand for the way that truly makes for peace, for nonviolence, which Jesus taught was the way of God.

What is a hero?  A hero is someone who risks much to save others.  A hero is one who risks much to take a stand for conscience, to stand for what is right when doing so isn’t popular, won’t be understood, and can have significant negative consequences for the person taking the stand.  Americans who have said no to the war machine have risked much to save the world from violence.  They have taken a stand for conscience, stood for what is right, when what they have done has not been popular, has been misunderstood, and has often had significant negative consequences for them.  They are heroes.  The world may not see them as heroes, but Jesus said “my kingdom is not from this world.”  John 18:36  They may not be heroes by the standards of the kingdoms of the world, grounded in violence, but they are heroes by the standards of the Kingdom of God, grounded in nonviolence. 

So today I celebrate the heroes.  I celebrate the heroes of the Kingdom of God, the heroes not of the world’s way of violence but of God’s way of nonviolence.  Those who have refused to fight and all who have devoted their lives to ending war, to working toward a world in which no one would ever fight again.  They are not “veterans.”  No one plays basketball games on aircraft carriers, or anywhere else, to honor them.  The world does not celebrate them.  The world mostly condemns them, but then the world condemned Jesus too.  Our call as Christians is to be true to the Kingdom of God, not to the empires of the world.  So today let us celebrate some real heroes, heroes of the Kingdom, heroes of faith, heroes of conscience.